Part V The Baconian Theory
He English Renaissance Drama seems naturally to group itself into two grand divisions: the Elizabethan drama and—Shakespeare. There is nothing in the first which surprises: which impresses us as too abrupt a departure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the middle age mummeries—“miracle plays” and “mysteries”—or as being too refined or elaborate for the groundlings who swaggered and swilled beer, or the lords and maids of honor who ogled and flirted in the contemporary barns called “play-houses” in the days of Elizabeth. But that the proprietor of one of these barns should have found it to his profit to have overshot the intelligence of his audience by creating a Hamlet, a Lear, Brutus, and Macbeth—the action of whose roles are intellectual rather than scenic—for his players, or an Ophelia, Isabella, or Catharine for the small boys employed to render his female parts, is an incongruity—to put it mildly—which arrests our credulity at once.
The utmost that the Shakespeareans propose to do—the utmost they attempt—is to make out William Shakespeare to have been an Elizabethan Dramatist. But the Elizabethan Dramatist was a man who catered to the Elizabethan play-goer. Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, and the rest, were Elizabethan Dramatists. But their names are only a catalogue to-day. If we happen to buy a set of their works at a bargain, at some old book sale, we may put them on our shelves; but we are not equal to the laborious task of reading them. The Shakespearean Drama is a thing apart. Its Dramatic form seems only an Incident; perfect as that Incident is, there is so much more in it that we find appealing to our hearts and intellects to-day, that we hesitate to ascribe it even to an Elizabethan Dramatist. The Baconian theory, as elaborated by Holmes, we understand to be that this element apart from the Dramatic, in these days is the key-note and explanation of the whole Shakespeare mystery, and leads to the discovery that “Shakespeare” was only a convenient name under which the popular ear was sought to be arrested by a Philosopher, who wrote in cipher, as it were, for a great purpose of his own.
The philosophical system contemplated by Francis Bacon—say the Baconians—was divided into two grand Divisions, the Didactic and the Historical. The first—its author (despairing of contemporary fame, or possibly distrustful of the permanence of the vernacular) locked up in the universal language of scholars, and left it by his testament to “the next ages.” The other he chose to put into Dramatic form. The spirit, motive, theme, and purport of two great phenomena of English letters, synchronizing in date (the philosophical canon of Bacon and the dramatic canon of “Shakespeare,”) are identical, and form together essentially one great body of philosophy and inductive science, and, therefore, must have had the one author. “It is a thing, indeed, if practiced professionally, of low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline, it is of excellent use—I mean stage playing.” he says himself. And again: “Dramatic poetry is as history made visible.” This Historical or preliminary division of the Philosophy did not need a dead, but a living language—the language of his race. This he left in English: and when, at the end, a broken, weak, despised old man—knowing himself only too well to be the meanest and weakest of his kind; but yet conscious of having, in a large sense, worked for the good of his fellow-men—he made no excuse or palliation, but only bespoke for himself and his life “men’s charitable speeches.”
But, if there was but one author for these two contemporary works, why not William Shakespeare as well as Francis Bacon? Why not ask the question, “Did William Shakespeare write Lord Bacon’s works?”* as well as, “Did Lord Bacon write William Shakespeare’s work?” While not within our scope to demonstrate the identical philosophy of the Novum Organum and the Shakespearean Drama—(a work to which Miss Bacon devoted her life—and whose demonstration has been followed by Judge Holmes)—it is property within that scope to examine, from the outside, the question whether, as matter of fact, William Shakespeare could have written either; or whether, from circumstantial evidence merely, Lord Bacon was thus, and in pursuance of a great purpose, actually the author of the Dramatic canon of “Shakespeare.”
How, aside from any opinion as to their value, beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of the Shakespearean works which, under the calmest and most sternly judicial treatment to which they could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be beyond gainsay or neglect. These two characteristics are—1. The encyclopaedic universality of their information as to matters of fact; and, 2. The scholarly refinement of the style displayed in them. Their claim to eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a question of taste; and we may conceive of whole peoples—as, for example, the Zulus or the Ashantees—impervious to any admiration for the Shakesperean plays on that account. But this familiarity with what, at their date, was the Past of history, and—up to that date—the closed book of past human discovery and research which we call Learning; is an open and indisputable fact; and the New-Zealander who shall sit on a broken arch of London Bridge and muse over the ruins of British civilization, if he carry his researches back to the Shakespearean literature, will be obliged to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the accumulated learning of the world down to his own actual day. Moreover, this scholar would not be compelled to this decision only by a careful examination of the entire Shakespearean opera. He will be forced to so conclude on an examination of any one, or, at the most, of any given group of single plays. Let him open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the “Julius Cæsar.”*
Even the artificial Alexander Pope (who, so far from being an over-estimator of the Shakespearean works, only, from the heights of his superior plane, admits them very grudgingly to a rank beside the works of Waller) was obliged to confess as much. “This Shakespeare,” says Mr. Pope, “must have been very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of antiquity. In ‘Coriolanus’ and ‘Julius Cæsar,’ not only the spirit, but the manner of the Romans is exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shown between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former and of the latter. No one is more a master of the poetical story, or has more frequent allusions to the various parts of it. Mr. Waller (who has been celebrated for this last particular) has not shown more learning in this way than Shakespeare,” * But, if the New-Zealander be a philologist, he will scarcely need perusal of more than a Shakespearean page to arrive at this judgment. Wherever else the verdict of scholarship may err, the microscope of the philologist cannot err. Like the skill of the chirographical expert, it is infallible, because, just as the hand of a writer, however cramped, affected, or disguised, will unconsciously make its native character of curve or inclination, so the speech of a man will be molded by his familiarity, be it greater or less, with the studies, learning, tastes, and conceits of his own day, and by the models before him. He cannot unconsciously follow models that are unknown to him, or speak in a language he has never learned.
corroboration of history, that they were only the forgeries of a precocious boy. To just as moral a certainty are the handiwork of the Elohist and the Jehovist discernible in the Hebrew Scriptures, and just as absolutely incapable of an alternative explanation are the ear-marks of the Shakespearean text. Hallam, whose eyes were never opened to the truth, and who lived and died innocent of any anti-Shakespearean theory (though he sighed for a “Shakespeare of heaven,” turning in disgust from the “Shakespeare of earth,” of whom only he could read in history), noticing the phases, unintelligible and improper except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in the plays, proceeds to say: “In the ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ these are much less frequent than in his later dramas; but here we find several instances. Thus, ‘Things base and vile, holding no quantity’ (for value) rivers that ’have overborne their continents’ (the continenti riva of-Horace); ‘compact of imagination;’ ’something of great constancy’ (for consistency); ’sweet Pyramus translated there;’ ’the law of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate,’ etc. I have considerable doubts,” continues Mr. Hallam, “whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth’s reign, which was less overrun with pedantry than that of her successor. Could authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one who did not understand their proper meaning would have introduced them into poetry.”*
Young Chatterton deceived the most profound scholars of his day, and his manuscripts stood every test but this; but under it they revealed the fact, so soon to receive the mournful social speech in those days, even in the highest walks of life—we happen to have very graphic accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s sayings and retorts courteous (as, e. g., when she boxed Essex’s ears and told him to go and be hanged)—it requires considerable credulity to assign this classic diction to a rustic apprentice from Stratford, who, at “about eighteen,” begins his dramatic labors, fresh from the shambles, and with no hiatus for a college course between.
Add to this the patent fact that the antique allusions in the plays “have not regard to what we may call ‘school classics,’ but to authors seldom perused but by profound scholars”* even to-day: and technical exploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the Shakespearean text, can bring evidence only cumulative as to the result already obtained. But, if we pass from the technical structure to the material of the plays, we are confronted with the still more amazing discovery that, not only the lore of the past was at the service of their author, but that he had no less an access to secrets supposed to be locked in the very womb of Time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet distant future, were to immortalize their first sponsors.
** Though not, perhaps, universally now-a-days. The late John Elliotson declared that the circulation through the lungs had certainly been taught seventy years previously by Servetus, who was burned at the stake in 1553. Dr. Robert Willis asserts, in his “Life of Harvey,” that the facts he used were familiarly known to most of his predecessors for a century previous. Izaak Walton states that Harvey got the idea of circulation from Walter Warner, the mathematician; and that eminent physician, John Hunter, remarks that Servetus first, and Realdus Columbus afterward, clearly announced the circulation of the blood through the lungs; and Cisalpinus, many years before Harvey, published, in three different works, all that was wanting in Servetus to make the circulation complete. Wotton says that Servetus was the first, as far as he could learn, who had a distinct idea of this matter. Even the Chinese were impressed with this truth some four thousand years before Europeans dreamed of it. Plato affirmed—“the heart being the knot of the veins, and the fountain from whence the blood arises and briskly circulates through all the members.” This, however, rather adds to than lessens the strength of the argument drawn from finding the “discovery” in the plays.
For example, Dr. Harvey does not announce—what is credited to him *—his discovery of the circulation of the blood in the human system—until 1619 (his book was not published until 1628), three years after William Shakespeare’s death. But why need Dr. Harvey have resorted to vivisection to make his “discovery”? He need only have taken down his “Shakespeare.” Is there any thing in Dr. Harvey any more exactly definite than the following?
“I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o’ the brain,
And, through the cranks and offices of man:
The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins,
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live.”
— Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1.
“... had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick
(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins”).
—King John, Act III, Scene 3.=
... As dear to me as are tlie ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.”
—Julius Caesar, Act IT, Scene 1.
Harvey’s discovery, however, is said to have been the theory of Galen, Paracelsus, and Hippocrates (who substituted the liter for the heart), and to have been held also by Rabelais. Neither Galen, Paracelsus, Hippocrates, nor Rabelais was a text-book at Stratford grammar-school during the two terms Mr. De Quincy placed William Shakespeare as a pupil there—but William has them at his fingers’ ends. There are said to be no less than seventy-eight passages in the plays wherein this fact of the circulation of the blood is distinctly alluded to; and, as to Galen and Paracelsus, they intrude themselves unrestrictedly all through the plays, without the slightest pretext or excuse:
“Parolles. So I say; both of Galen and Paracelsus.
Lafeu. Of all the learned and authentic fellows.”
—All’s Well that Ends Well, Act II, Scene 3.
“Host of the Garter Inn. What says my Æsculapius? my Galen?”
—Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II., Scene 3.
In King Henry VI. Part II., Act ii, Scene 2, the erudite Bardolph and Falstaff’s classical page make a learned blunder about Althea, whom the page confounds with Hecuba. And so on. Are we to believe that this sometime butcher’s boy and later stage manager has his head so brimming full of his old Greeks and philosophers that he can not for a moment miss their company, and makes his very panders and public-cans prate of them? Even if it were the commonest thing in the world, nowadays, in 1881, for our Mr. Boucicault or Mr. Daly to write a play expressly to catch the taste of the canaille of the Old Bowery (or, for that matter, of the urbane and critical audiences of Wallack’s or the Union Square), and stuff all the low-comedy parts with recondite and classical allusion (for this is precisely what William Shakespeare is said to have done for the unroofed play-house in the mud of the Bankside in London, some three hundred years ago or less, and to have coined a fortune at)—even, we say, if it were the simplest thing in the world to imagine this sort of play writing to-day, would it be a wilder flight of fancy to suggest a pale student in London in the days of Queen Elizabeth, somewhere among the garrets of Gray’s Inn, writing dialogues into which Galen and Paracelsus would intrude unbidden—and a stage manager letting them stay there as doing no harm (or, may be, taking them for names, of dogs or wenches—at any rate, as good, mouth-filling words, to be paid for at the lowest market price):* than to conceive a twelfth manager and proprietor of this home of the Muses, and whilom sticker of calves, after the day’s labor, shunning his cups and the ribald mirth-making of those sad dogs, his fellow managers, to seek, in the solitude of his library and Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this same Galen and Paracelsus?
See Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” Act I, Scene 1—“O, spite, too old to be engaged to young!” etc. Again—“Too old, by Heaven! Let still the woman take an elder than herself.” Again—“Then let thy love be younger than thyself,” etc., etc. (“Twelfth Night,” Act II., Scene 4.)
It is very difficult to suppose that Shakespeare should have wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might snub her in private); though it is very easy to imagine his passing it over in another man’s manuscript in hurried perusal in the green-room.”—Chambers’s Journal, August 7, 1852,p. 89.
Newton, who was only born in 1642—twenty years after Shakespeare was laid away in his tomb—surely need not have lain under his appletree in the orchard at Woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal the immutable truth of gravitation. He had but to take down his copy of “Troilus and Cressida” (printed in 1606) to open to the law itself, as literally stated as he himself could have formulated it:
“Cressida.... But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very center of the earth,
Drawing all things to it.”
—Troilus and Cressida, Act IV., Scene 2.
Are we called upon to tax our common sense to fancy our manager, on one of his evenings at home, after the play at the Globe was over, snugly in his library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows over their cups, stumbling upon the laws of the circulation of the blood and of gravitation, engrossing them “without blotting out a line,” and sending the “copy” to the actors so that they could commit it to memory for the stage on the following evening?
What a library it was—that library up among the flies (if they had such things) of the old Globe Theater! What an Elihu Burritt its owner must have been, to have snatched from his overworked life—from the interval between the night’s performance and the morning’s routine—the hours to labor over Galen and Paracelsus and Plato in the original Greek! It was miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his forge, in the nineteenth century—surrounded with libraries, and when books could be had for the purchasing—could have mastered all the known languages. But that William Shakespeare, with only two terms at Stratford school, (or, let us say, twenty years at Stratford School, or at the University of Oxford—for there is as much evidence that he was at Oxford as that he was at Stratford school) without books, since there were no books purchasable, should have known every thing that was written in books! Surely there never was such a miracle as this!
“He was the prophet of geology,” says Fullom, “before it found an exponent in Werner;”
“O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate;
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent
(Weary of solid firmness) melt itself
Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beechy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune’s hips.” **
And yet William Shakespeare had but two terms of Hunt, Jenkins and Stratford school! And, Mr. Malone believed, had never even gone so far into the classics as to have read Tacitus! ***
* “History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with New
Facts and Traditions.” By W. S. Fullom, London: Saunders,
Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864.
** “King Henry IV.,” Part II., Act 3, Scene i.
*** See ante, p. 88.
What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous Stratford school, “two terms,” of which—between his poaching and his beer-bouting—were all the schooling William Shakespeare ever had, according to all bis biographies. (We say, all he ever had, because his father was so illiterate that he signed every thing with a mark, and so did his mother, and so did the rest of William’s family; and the boy William was too busy at skylarking—according to those who knew him—to have had much opportunity of private instruction at the parental knee, even had the parental acquirements been adequate.) Were the theory and practice of the common law taught there? “Legal phrases flow from his pen,” says Mr. Grant White, “as a part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.... This conveyancer’s jargon (‘fine and recovery,’ ‘tenure,’ ‘fee simple,’ ‘fee farm,’ etc., etc.) could not have been picked up by hanging around the courts in London, two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. And, besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his early plays, written in his first Loudon years, as in those produced at a later period.” * And not only in the technique, but in the groundwork of that mighty and abstruse science, the law of England,” is he perfect. A chief justice of England has declared that “while novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare’s law, lavishly as he expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error.”**
* Memoir,” p. 47. And see “Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?” By H.
T———-. London: Longmans, Green, Reader A Dyer, 1871.
Were medicine and surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill * asserted in 1860 that it has been possible to compare Shakespeare’s knowledge with the most advanced knowledge of the present day. And not only in the general knowledge of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in these days “medical jurisprudence,” the man that wrote the historical play of Henry IV. seems to have been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown ** says that in “Frost’s case” (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial for murder, the defense set up that the deceased had committed suicide. A celebrated physician being on the stand as an expert on this question, was examined as follows:
Q. What are the general indications of death from violence?
A. My knowledge will not enable me to answer so broad a question.
And yet Mr. Brown points out that “William Shakespeare’s knowledge had enabled him” to answer so “broad a question:”
“Warwick. See how the blood is settled in his face!
Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless.
****
But see, his face is black and full of blood;
His eyeballs further out than when he lived,
Staring full ghastly, like a strangled man;
His hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling;
* “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare.” J. C. Bucknill, M. D.
London, 1860. And see Appendix I.
** The Forum. By David Paul Brown. Philadelphia, 1856.
His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped
And tugged for life, and was by strength subdued. ****
It can not be but he was murdered here;
The least of all these signs were probable.”*
All the arts, sciences, and literatures must have been mastered by our sleepless Shakespeare, either at Stratford school, or in the midst of his London career, when operating two theaters, reading plays for his stage, editing them, engrossing the parts for his actors, and acting himself. (And Mr. Cohn will have it that in these unaccounted-for times, he had visited Germany with his troupe and performed in all its principal cities, coining money as he went.) ** Mr. Brown, Dr. Bell, and others, announce that they believe that these travels of his extended to Italy, and Mr. Thoms and Mr. Cohn, to some extent, account for Shakespeare on the continent, by believing that, instead of going at once to London, when fleeing from Stratford before Sir Thomas Lucy, he enlisted under Leicester for the Netherlands in 1585, but left the ranks for the more lucrative career of an actor. But these theories only crowd still more thickly the brief years in which the great works (which are, after all, what the world regards in these investigations), appeared.
** “Shakespeare in Germany. By Albert Cohn. London and
Berlin: Asher &Co., 1865. And see Shakespeare’s
Autographical Poems, by Charles Armitage Brown. Essays on
Shakespeare, by Karl Elze. London, Macmillan & Co., 1874.
The Suppose Travels of Shakespeare. Three Notelets on
Shakespeare. Thoms: London, 1865.
Either at Stratford school, or in the Blackfriars, or else by pure intuition, all this exact learning must have “been absorbed.
The classical course conducted by Hunt and Jenkins must have been far more advanced than is common in our modern colleges, in Columbia or Harvard, for example. For not only did Rowe and Knight find traces in “Shakespeare” of the Electra of Sophocles, Colman of Ovid, Farmer of Horace and Virgil, Steevens of Plautus, and White of Euripides, which are read today in those universities; but Pope found traces of Dares and Phrygius, and Malone of Lucretius, Status and Catullus, which are not ordinarily used as textbooks to-day in our colleges.
The name and character of “Imogen” is derived from an Italian novel not then—and perhaps not how—translated into English. Tschischwitz finds in “Hamlet” the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, professor at Wittemberg in 1583-86. All these are no stumbling-blocks to those who adhere to the Baconian authorship.
But, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin aside, was English taught at Stratford school? If it were, it would have been the most wonderful of all, for, as a matter of fact in those days, and for many long years thereafter, English was a much snubbed acquirement. The idea of education was to read, talk, and quote Latin, Greek, and the dead languages, the child was put to his “accidence.” instead of his horn-book, and scholars scorned to spend much time on their own vernacular. But even should we concede that it was genius that made the village boy master of a diction the grandest of which his mother tongue was capable, there is a greater difficulty beyond, over which the concession will not lift us. This difficulty has been so succinctly stated by Mr. Grant White, in his “Essay Toward the Expression of Shakespeare’s Genius,” that we can not do better than quote his words. “It was only in London that those plays could have been written. London had but just before Shakespeare’s day made its metropolitan supremacy felt as well as acknowledged throughout England. As long as two hundred years after that time the county of each member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue..... Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire might have produced Shakespeare’s mind; but had he lived in any one of those counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality from London, and written for his rural neighbors instead of for the audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear, the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony roughness of his rustic phraseology. His language would have been a dialect which must needs have been translated to be understood by modern English ears.” * As Mr. White wrote these words, did it not occur to him that, by his own chronology,** this Warwickshire rustic came to London with “Venus and Adonis” in his pocket, and began, almost immediately, the production of plays, not in the Warwickshire dialect, which he had grown up in from his birth, but in a diction that needs no translating “to be understood by modern English ears?”
* Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. I., p. cxcvi.
Robert Burns became great in the dialect of his home, which he made into music through the alembic of his genius. When, later in life, he essayed to write in metropolitan English, says Principal Shairp, “he was seldom more than a third-rate—a common clever versifier.” * But this uncouth Warwickshire rustic writes, as his first essay in English composition, the most elegant verses the age produced, and which for polish and care surpass his very latest works! Every step in the received Shakespeare’s life appears to have been a miracle: for, according to them, the boy Shakespeare needed to be taught nothing, but was born versed in every art, tongue, knowledge, and talent, and did every thing without tuition or preparation.
And in the long vacation of this precious school how much our worthy pupil—whose paternal parent was in hiding from his creditors so that he dare not be seen at church—supplemented its curriculum by feasts of foreign travel! For it is only the careful student of these plays who knows or conceives either their wealth of exact reference to the minutest features of the lands or the localities in which their actions lie, or the conclusions to be drawn therefrom. There were no guide-books or itineraries of Venice published until after William Shakespeare had ceased writing for the stage: and yet, while schoolboy facts—such as that Venice is built in the sea, or that gondolas take the place of wheeled vehicles, or that there is a leaning tower at Pisa, or a coliseum at Verona or Rome—are not referred to (the out-door action in “Othello” or the “Merchant of Venice” is* always in a street or open place in that city, canals and gondolas being never mentioned), the most casual, inadvertant, and trivial details of Italian matters (such as a mere tourist, however he might have observed, would scarcely have found of enough interest to mention to his neighbors on returning home), are familiarly and incidentally alluded to, making the phenomena of all this familiarity with Italy quite too prominent to be overlooked. A poet like Samuel Rogers writes a poem on Italy. All that is massive, venerable, and sublime; all that touches his heart as pitiful, or appeals to his nature as sensuous and romantic, goes down in his poem. The scenes Mr. Rogers depicts are those which crowd most upon the cultivated tourist to-day—the past of history that must stir the soul to enthusiasm. But here are plays, written before the days of guide-books (and if there had been any such things, they would have enlarged upon the same features that Mr. Rogers did), which are at home in the unobserved details which the fullest Murray or Baedeker find it unnecessary to mention. Portia sends her servant Balthazar to fetch “notes and garments” of her learned cousin, Bellario, and to meet her at the “common ferry which trades to Venice.” There are two characters named “Gobbo” in the play—a frequent Venetian name in a certain obscure walk, and one which a mere tourist would be most unlikely to meet with. Othello brings Desdemona from her father’s house to his residence in the “Sagittary.” In “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Valentine is made to embark at Verona for Milan, and in “Hamlet,” Baptista is used as the name of a woman. Both of these latter were sneered at as mistakes for some hundred years, until one learned German discovers that Baptista is not uncommonly used as a woman’s name in Italy, * and another learned German that, in the sixteenth century, Milan and Verona were actually connected by canals, ** with which the surface of Italy was intersected! etc., etc. Dr. Elze was made a careful collation of these instances (which need not detain us here except by way of reference), in an essay on the supposed travels of Shakespeare, wherein he, from the same internal evidence, regards it certain that the writer (William Shakespeare he calls him), not only visited Italy, but Scotland, absorbing all he saw with the same microscopical exactness.
* “English Men of Letters. Robert Burns.
And were the modern languages also taught by this myriad-minded Jenkins? Mr. Grant White says emphatically, No! “Italian and French, we may be sure, were not taught at Stratford school.” *** And yet William Shakespeare borrowed copiously from Boccaccio, Cinthio, and Belleforest.
Ulrici **** says (quoting Klein) that the author of “Romeo and Juliet” must have read “Hadriana,” a tragedy by an Italian named Groto, and Mr. Grant White points out that Iago’s speech, “Who steals my purse, steals trash,” etc., is a perfect paraphrase of a stanza in Berni’s “Orlando Innamorato,” of which poem, says Mr. White, to this day (1864) there is no English version.
* A Von Beumont. Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 21, 1870.
** Karl Elze on Shakespeare, p. 296. London. Macmillan &
Co. 1874.
*** Memoir. Works, p. xxi.
**** Vol. I, p. 253.
Mr. White furnishes a translation of the stanza of Berni, which is certainly startingly like.1 And yet Mr. White clings to his Stratford school, where “Beeston” told Aubrey that William Shakespeare was once a school-master. Perhaps Mr. White refuses to be converted because he has discovered that Dr. Farmer discovered that, when, in the “Taming of the Shrew,” Tranio quotes Terence, “he is inaccurate, and gives the passage, not as it appears in the text of the Latin dramatist, but as it is misquoted in the Latin grammar of William Lily; a school-book in common use among our forefathers when William Shakespeare was a boy.” ** But (though somebody has suggested that William might have risen to be “head boy” at Stratford grammar school; and been, in that capacity, intrusted with hearing the lessons of the smaller boys, whence the school-master story may have arisen), the Beestou story has been rejected by all the commentators with a unanimity of which, we believe, it is the only instance, in case of a Shakespearean detail. So far as we know, there has been but one effort to prove that William Shakespeare was a university man. ***
| * | Ante, p. 64, note. |
| ** | Id. p. xx. |
| *** | “Some Shakespearean and Spenserian MSS.,” “American |
| Whig Review,” December, 1851, |
But if, instead of going to school, or operating a theater, William had passed his days as a journeyman printer, he could hardly have been more at home to the mysteries of that craft. Mr. Blades, a practical printer, has found in the Works so many terms, technical to and employed in the exact sense of the composing and press-rooms, that they seriously add to the enumeration of possible Shakesperean vocations. For example:
“Behold, my Lords,
Although the print be little, the whole matter
And copy of the father,
The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger.”
Witness, also, the following:
“You are but as a form in wax, by him imprinted.
—Midsummer-Night’s Dream, I, 1.
“His heart, with your print impressed.
—Lovés Labours Lost, II, 1.
A small type, called nonpareil, was introduced into English printing houses from Holland about the year 1650, and became admired and preferred beyond the others in common use. It seems to have become a favorite type with Shakespeare, who calls many of his lady characters “Nonpareils.” Prospero calls his daughter “a Nonpareil.” (Tempest, Act III, Scene 2d) Olivia, in “Twelfth Night,” is the “Nonpareil of Beauty” (Act I, Scene 5), and in Cymbeline, Posthumous is made to call Imogen the “Nonpareil of her time” (Act II, Scene 5).
When a certain number of pages of type have been composed they are placed in an iron frame called a “chase,” laid upon an “imposing” stone, a piece of beveled wood, called a “sidestick,” is placed beside the pages, and small wedges of beveled hard wood, called “coigns,” or “quoins,” are tightly driven in, holding the pages firmly in their places, and making a compact “form.” Surely there is an allusion to this in Pericles III, 1.
“By the four opposing coigns
Which the world together joins.”
Before tlie “form” is taken from the stone to be put on the press, the quoins are made very tight with a “mallet” to insure its “lifting” safely.
“There is no more conceit in him than there is in a mallet.”
—2 Henry IV, 2.
which process is called “locking-up,” and when completed, the form is said, technically, to be “locked-up,” or fast.
“fast locked-up in sleep.”
—Measure for Measure, IV, 2.
And to what but the care taken by a printer to make his forms “register” can we attribute the use of that word in Anthony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Scene 9.
“But let the world rank me in register—
A master leaver and a fugitive.”
Punctuation is a fruitful source of misunderstanding between an author and his printer. Very few authors punctuate their manuscript as they would wish to see it in the print, and fewer yet are apt to be good natured and satisfied when the printer punctuates for them. William Shakespeare may have remembered this when he wrote:
“Wherefore stand you on nice points?”
—3 Henry VI, iv, 7.
“Stand a comma ’tween their amities.”
—Hamlet, V, 2.
“My point and period,... ill or well.”
—Lear, IV 7.
“points that seem impossible.”
—Pericles, V, 1.
“Puts the period often from his place.”
—Lucrece, line 565.
“You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent.”
“No levelled malice infests one comma.”
— Timon, I, 1.
“Come we to full points here? And are et ceteras nothing?”
Possibly a book-worm, or even a bookseller might draw as many similes as Shakespeare did, from books—as for example:
“Show me your image in some antique book.”
—Sonnet, 1. ix.
“Has a book in his pocket with red letters in it.”
—2 Henry VI, ix, 2.
“My red dominical—my golden letter!”
—Loves Labours Lost, V, 2.
referring to the rubricated editions of books so common in the seventh century, or the golden letters used in the calendar; or again,
“To place upon the volume of your deeds
As in a title-page, your worth of arms.”
—Pericles, 77, 3.
“This man’s brow, like to a title-leaf,
Foretells the nature of a tragic volume.”
—2 Henry IV, i, 1.
But in the following:
“The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear.”
—Sonnet, 1. xxvii.
it is hard to be persuaded that direct allusion is not made to the English custom (which still obtains, as any body may see for himself by opening a book printed—wherever published—in England) of placing the typographer’s imprint upon the vacant or extra leaf or leaves—where the text runs short, at the end of the volume; just as, if an American publisher, who buys a hundred copies of an English work, may stipulate to have his imprint put upon the title-page (or, perhaps, print his own title-page in this country), the last page of the book itself will invariably reveal whether the actual manufacture was in England or not; an analogy which implies technical information. An image employed by Othello, who takes his wife’s hand in his, and says,
“Here’s a young and sweating devil.”
—Othello, III. 4.
is, Mr. Blades thinks, misunderstood. If his wife’s palm was the messenger, as Othello suspected, of her desires to Cassio, there would be some propriety—from a printer’s standpoint—in calling it “a devil,” for a printer’s “devil” is his messenger or errand boy: though another meaning is not so far fetched in sound to a non-professional.
We have mentioned that the Stationer’s Company was a fraternity composed only of monopolists, each of whom had a monopoly, from the crown, of the printing of certain books. It was a part of their duty to give notice of this monopoly upon every impression of the book, precisely as the notice of copyright entry is obliged by law to be printed to-day upon copyrighted books. The entry was to be expressed, after the printer’s name, or at least, conspicuously on the title-page, in the formula, “cum privilégia ad imprimendum solum;” and as the formula was to be incessantly used it was undoubtedly “kept standing” in the composing room.
It is curious to notice, in the “Taming of the Shrew,” Act iv., Scene 4, the recurrence of this formula in a speech of Biondello:
Bion. I can not tell; except they are busied about a counterfeit assurance; take you assurance of her cum privilegio ad im-primendum solum to the church.
It is to be noticed that the word “counterfeit” in the above speech, was a printer’s term in those days; and, used in the printer’s technical sense, would be applicable; for Biondello is counseling Lucertio to marry Bianca out of hand, and without waiting for her father and his counselor who are discussing the marriage treaty. A “counterfeit” was a reprint (as we would say now, a “reprint in fac-simile”).*
Again: it might be supposed that a country lad should know the ways of dogs and birds and beasts and creeping things. But it happens to be human experience that the country lad is the least likely person to turn out a naturalist. It is much more probable that some over-worked shoemaker, in some rare escape from his city garret, should find his thoughts awakened by watching an ant-hill, and succeed in years in making himself an entomologist; than that the farmer’s boy, who catches bugs every day to bait his fish-hook, should turn out an entomologist; just as it is not the farmer’s daughter, but the fashionable young lady from town who tramps the fields and tears her hands for wild-flowers or wets her feet for the pond lilies. But whoever wrote the plays had found time to learn all the ways of these. Says Bottom, to Cobweb, the fairy, in “Midsummer Wight’s Bream,” “Monsieur, get your weapons in your hand and kill me a red-hipped bumblebee on the top of a thistle.” In the United States as well as England, there is no more likely place to find a bumblebee in midsummer than on a thistle. In “Much Ado about Nothing,” Benedict says to Margaret “Thy wit is as quick as a greyhound’s mouth. It catches.” The peculiarity of a greyhound is that, unlike other dogs, it is able to catch game in its mouth as it runs; other hounds must stop to do this. In “As You Like It,” Celia tells Rosalind that Monsieur Le Beau, who comes with his mouth full of news, will feed it to them “as pigeons feed their young,” and Rosalind replies, “Then we shall be news crammed.” Pigeons bring food to their young in their crops, and cram it down their young ones’ throats, as no other birds do. In “Twelfth Night” the clown tells Viola that “fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings—the husband’s the bigger.” The pilchard closely resembles the herring, but is thicker and heavier, with larger scales. In the same play Maria says of Malvolio, “Here comes the trout which must be caught with tickling.” Expert anglers know that by gently tickling a trout’s sides and belly, it can be so mesmerized as to be taken out of the water with the hand. In “As you Like It,” we have the lines “For look where Beatrice, like the lapwing, runs close by the ground to hear our conference.” The lapwing is a kind of plover which is very swift of foot and which, when trying to avoid being seen, keeps its head close to the ground as it runs. Says Lear’s fool, “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long that it had its head bit off by its young.” The hedge-sparrow in England is a favorite bird for the cuckoo to impose its young upon. In “All’s Well that Ends Well,” Lafeu says of Farolles “I took this lark for a bunting.” The English bunting is a field bird of the same form and color as the lark, but inferior as a singer. And so the figures are always accurate, “the ousel-cock so black of hue,” “the throstle with his note so true,” “the wren with little quill,” “the russet-pated chough, rising and cawing at the guns report.” And so of flowers, as when Perdita speaks of
—daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty—
the writer knew that in England the daffodil blooms in February and March, while the swallow never appears until April. In none of the allusions to nature or natural phenomena in the plays, is there any such thing as guess work. * Now, what was the necessity for all this technical, geographical, botanical, and occult learning, in a simple drama thrown off by an Elizabethan dramatist, earning his living by catering to an Elizabethan audience? It was not only unnecessary, but almost fatal to his success. The Elizabethan audience did not want scientific treatises.
* And see further “The natural History of the Insects
mentioned in Shakespeare,” by R. Paterson. London: A. K.
Newman & Co., Leadenhall street, “The natural
History of the Insects mentioned in Shakespeare,” by R.
Paterson. London: A. K. Newman & Co., Leadenhall street,
1841.
But nothing—from governmental polity to the stuffing of a fowl—from processes of the human mind to the management of kitchen gardens—was too small or rude for a philosopher’s (let us say for Francis Bacon’s) vast purposes. How otherwise are they to be accounted for?
That Shakespeare borrowed Greene’s famous “sea-coast” is a point either way. If he took it supposing that Bohemia had a sea-coast, the omnipotent knowledge assigned him by his worshipers failed him at least once. And if he knew (as is now claimed, though on what authority we know not), that Bohemia once possessed provinces on the Adriatic, he knew, as usual, what the acute research of three hundred years has only just developed. And was agriculture taught at this Stratford school, and politics and the art of war?1 And was there any thing that William Shakespeare did not know? We are entitled to ask these questions, for it must be remembered that, before the appearance of the Shakespearean dramas, there was practically no literature written in the English tongue. To use the words of Macauley, “A person who did not read Latin and Greek could read nothing, or next to nothing.... The Italian was the only modern language which possessed any thing that could be called a literature.” ** One possessing, then, merely “small Latin and less Greek,” could not have written “Shakespeare.” Still less could he have written it out of Gower and Chaucer, and the shelf-full of English hooks that made up all there was in English letters.
* See “Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?” Three Notelets on
Shakespeare, by Wm. J. Thoms, London. John Russell Smith,
1865.
** Essays. Lord Bacon.
But if the Stratford grammar-school confined its teachings to the pages of the English bible alone, it worked wonders, for Bishop Wadsworth goes so far as to declare, that “take the entire range of English literature—put together our best authors, who have written on subjects not professedly religious, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all, printed so much evidence of the Bible being read and used, as in Shakespeare alone.” * Yet William Shakespeare had little opportunity for self-education, except these two terms at Stratford school; he was a lad-of-all-work at the Bankside Theater, when a mere child. He was only fifty-two years old when he died. He was one of several partners in certain theatrical establishments in London, in the years when he must have put all this multitudinous learning, he had carried in his head so long, on paper. He was so active, industrious, and shrewd in those years, that he alone of the partners was able to retire with a fortune—to purchase lands and a grant of arms for his father (whence he himself might become an esquire by descent); and, in the years of leisure after his retirement, he wrote only three or four epitaphs, which no other graduate of Stratford school would probably have cared to claim.
* Shakespeare’s use of the Bible. By Charles Wadsworth, p.
345. London. Smith Elder & Co., 1880.
It has only been within the last few years that hardy spirits—like Nathaniel Holmes—whose education has led them to look judicially backward from effects to causes—and whose experience had impressed them with the idea that most effects come in natural procession from causes somewhere—were courageous enough to seek the solution of this mystery—not in what is called the “internal evidence” of the plays themselves, but in the circumstances and surroundings, that is to say, in the external evidence of their date and production.
The Baconian theory is simply that, so far as the records of the Elizabethan period are accessible, there was but one man in England, at the date at which this Shakespearean literature appeared, who could have produced it. * The history of Bacon’s life, his massive acquirements, his profound scholarship even as a child: his advantages of foreign travel, his ambitious acquaintance with the court: and, joined to all, his dire necessities and his successive retirements (the dates of which, when collated, coincide with the dates at which the plays—tallying in matter with the circumstantial surroundings of Bacon’s life as, for example, Shylock appeared at about the time when Bacon was most helplessly in the toils of what he calls “the Lombardo”):—all this need not be recapitulated here. He was born and bred in the atmosphere of libraries. While William Shakespeare was poaching on Avon banks, the little Francis was impressed with the utter inadequacy of Aristotle’s method to grapple with modern needs, and meditating its superseding with labors of his own.
* Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon after-generations, I think we could have found no one of that day but Bacon to whom to assign this crown. In this case it would have been resting now on his head by almost common consent.”—(W. H. Furness to Judge Holmes, third edition of “Authorship of Shakespeare,” p. 628).
The gray-haired Queen, who in youth had called him her little Lord Keeper, will not lift a hand to aid him in his poverty, or to advance him in the State, regarding him as a man of study rather than of practice and experience; and so Bacon is known to have remained, bemoaning (as he himself says in a letter to Burleigh, written in 1592) “the meanness of my [his] estate; for though I can not accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get.” * This is the very year, 1592, in which Robert Greene “discovers that a new poet has arisen who is becoming the only shake-scene in a county;” and so far forgets himself as to become “jealous” of “William Shakespeare, who, up to this time, has only been a “Johannes Factotum,” of not much account until he borrows “our feathers.” ** And so, until 1611, Bacon is driven to the Jews. Why should he not, in his pressing necessity for “lease of quick revenue,” bethink him of the resources within himself, and seek a cover whereunder—without embarrassing his hope of future preferment—he may turn into gold his years of study and travel, by means of a quick pen?
In 1611, when he is suddenly created attorney-general, the Shakespearean plays cease abruptly, to appear no more for ever. William Shakespeare closes out his theatrical interest in London, and retires, to moneylending (as some say), in Stratford. He dies in 1616.
* Speckling, “Letters and Life of Bacon,” vol. i, p. 108.
** Ante, p. 125
Lord Bacon reaches his highest pinnacle of greatness, and falls, in 1621. In 1623, while Bacon is again spending his time in the strictest privacy and retirement, there suddenly appears a folio, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,” amended, revised, enlarged, and improved, including at least seventeen (Mr. Smith says twenty-three) plays which had never appeared or been heard of in Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Few of us—outside the ranks of commentators, like Mr. Grant White, and others, who give their valuable lives to this study—dream how vast were the emendations and revisions, enlargements and corrections of the old Shakespearean plays given to the world in this folio of 1623. Mr. White says that in the one play of “Love’s Labours Lost” there are inserted newlines in almost every speech.1 Another, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” according to Knight, ** has double the number of lines it originally possessed in 1600. The “Henry V.” has nineteen hundred new lines. The “Titus Andronicus” has an entire scene added, and the “Much Ado about Nothing” and “The Lear” are so altered and elaborated, with curtailment here and enlargement there, as to lead Mr. Knight to declare that “none but the hand of the master could have superadded them.” *** But, if William Shakespeare was the “master,” how did his hand reach up out of the grave under Stratford chancel, where it had rested seven years, to make these improvements?
| * | Cited by Holmes, “Authorship of Shakespeare,” third |
| edition, p. 71. | |
| ** | “Studies of Shakespeare,” p. 337. |
| *** | Id. |
And if William Shakespeare in his lifetime made those revisions for Heminges and Condell (who appear on the title-page of this folio of 1623 as editors, and announce in the preface that this edition is printed from the “true original copies”) at Stratford (where, according to his own inventory, he had neither library nor books—nor bookcase, nor writing table, for that matter), why did he not print them himself, for his own benefit, instead of performing all this labor of emendation for somebody else? He could not have been fearful lest he would lose money by them, for they had been the foundation and source of all his fortune. Nor had he grown, in his old age, indifferent to gain (let the ghost of the poor “delinquent for malt delivered” assure us of that!). He could not have revised them for pure glory: for, in his previous career, while in London, he had shown no interest in them, permitting them to be surreptitiously printed by whoever, in the same town with himself, listed so to do. He had even allowed them to be mixed up with other people’s trash, his name signed to all indifferently, and the whole made footballs of by the London printers, under his very nose, without so much as lifting a voice in protest, or to declare which were his and which were not. * Besides, if he had revised them for the glory of his own name, why did he not cause them to be printed? Nor can we suppose that he was employed to revise them, for pay, by Heminges and Condell, because, if they did so employ him, why did they carry the expense of the revision for seven long years, until he and his wife were both in their graves, before reimbursing themselves by printing the first folio for the market!
* See post, “The New Theory,” where it appears that, at the time Shakespeare was producing certain plays on his stage, certain others were being printed and circulated, as his, outside.
Last, and most wonderful of all, in this first folio are included all these entirely new plays which had never been heard of before! Who wrote those, and why? The answer to these riddles, the Baconians say, is that, when again at leisure, Bacon bethought himself of his scattered progeny, and—whether proposing to publicly own them or not—whether to secure them for posterity or merely for his own pastime—he devoted that leisure to a revision of the works by means of which he had bridged the first long interval in his career. At any rate, when the revision appeared, it is matter of fact that William Shakespeare was dead and in his grave, and speculation has nothing to do with that.
Besides the coincidence of the plays appearing during Bacon’s first retirement: ceasing altogether at his first elevation, and appearing in revised and improved form again after his final downfall, and during his second privacy, the Baconians cite: I. Contemporary statements, which include (A), Sir Tobie Matthew’s famous postscript:* “The most prodigious wit of these times is of your name, though he be known by another” (which Mr. Weiss ** explains, very lamely in our opinion, by arguing that the other name by which Bacon was known, and to which Matthew alludes, was “Viscount St. Albans); (B), a letter from Bacon
** “Wit, Humor and—Shakespeare.” By John Weiss. Boston. Roberts Brothers, 1876. Matthew writes this in a letter acknowledging receipt of a volume sent him by Bacon. If that volume was a copy of the “First Folio,” the postscript would be intelligible.
himself, to Sir John Davies, who is going to meet the new king James (with whom Bacon is striving for favor, looking to his own preferment), in which he commits to Sir John’s “faithful care and discretion” his interests at court, and adds, “So, asking you to be good to concealed poets, I continue,” etc., etc.; * II. Evidence by way of Innuendo, including another of Matthew’s postscripts (the one in which he writes to Bacon, “I will not return you weight for weight, but measure for measure,” etc.); also, perhaps, the injunctions of secrecy in Bacon’s own letters to Matthew, to “be careful of the writings submitted to you, that no one see them.” There is, besides, in many of Bacon’s preserved letters something suggestive of a “curious undermeaning, impressing the reader with an idea of more than appears on the surface.” The idea of the stage, as a figure of speech, occurs in a letter to the Queen: “Far be it from me to stage myself,” etc.; and in one to lady Buckingham, “I do not desire to stage myself but for the comfort of a private life,” etc. “Dramatic poesy,” he declares, “is as history made visible.” Writing to Matthew, he refers to a “little work of my recreation;” and Matthew, in return, banters him on writing many things “under another name.” This is in 1609, and no more “Shakespeare” plays appear until Othello, in 1621. The Jonson obituary verse—in which occur the encomiums so rung in our ears by the Shakespeareans (and which we have—earlier in these pages—seen was all they really had behind them), which we have thought could be most easily explained on the “nil mortuis nisi bonum” theory—are also
* Holmes, “Authorship of Shakespeare,”
regarded, we believe, by the Baconians, as Innuendo.*
III. The Parallelisms. That is to say, an almost identity of phraseology, found in both the Baconian and Shakespearean writings. The best list of these is to be found in Judge Holmes’ book, covering some twenty-five closely-printed pages. ** Of the value of this latter class of evidence, it is for every reader to judge for himself; but that a writer of exact science and moral philosophy should plagiarize from the theater, or the theater from the writer of exact science and moral philosophy; or (still more improbable) that two contemporary authors, in the full glare of the public eye, should select each other’s works to habitually and regularly plagiarize upon, are altogether, it seems to the Baconians, out of the question.
Which—since thy flight from hence, hath-mourned like night And despaired day—but for thy volume’s light—” they say, do not and can not, refer to William Shakespeare at all. For this was published in 1623, and William Shakespeare had been dead seven years. He could not “shine forth” again, except figuratively, in his volume, and this he already does by the publication of his works, and is admitted to do in the next line, where it is said that but for “thy volume’s light” the stage would “mourn in night.” The Baconians, who believe that Ben Jonson himself was the “Heminges and Condell” who edited the first folio, regarded this whole poem as a sop to Bacon, on Ben Jonson’s part.
** Pp. 306-326.
But even the conceiving of so unusual a state of affairs as a political philosopher and playwright contracting together to mutually plagiarize from each other’s writings would hardly account for the coincidence between the cottage scene (Act IV, Scene 3) in “A Winter’s Tale,” and Bacon’s “Essay on Gardens,” in which he maintained that “there ought to be gardens for all the months of the year; in which severally things of beauty may be in their season,” which he proceeds to suggest:
Were we assured that the prose in the left-hand column was the poet’s first rough notes for the exquisite poetry in the second, would there be any internal evidence for doubting it? And when it appears that “The Essay on Gardens” was not printed until 1625, nine years after William Shakespeare’s death and burial, and two years after an edition of his alleged plays, rewritten and revised, had appeared (when so deliberate a “steal” would hardly be profitable), the exoteric evidence seems at least to command attention.
A coincidence between a passage in “The Advancement of Learning” and in the play of “Troilus and Cressida,” Act II., Scene 2 (which, we shall see later on, first appeared in print, advertised as the work of a novice, in 1609, thereafter, within a few months, to be reissued as by William Shakespeare *—who was not, at the date of that edition, either a novice or a first appearance), is worth pausing to tabulate:
That the manager of a theater, in dressing up a play for the evening’s audience (and such an audience) should tuck in an allusion to Aristotle, to “catch the** ear of the groundlings”
* Post, “The New Theory.”
—or, finding it already in, should not have a sufficient acquaintance with Aristotle to scent an impropriety and take it out—is no less or no more absurd than that a philosopher, in composing so profound and weighty an essay as the “Advancement of Learning,” should go to a cheap play-house for his reference to the Greek sage. If Bacon did attend the theater that night to learn the opinion of Aristotle (whom he had criticised at college at the age of fifteen) on young blood and philosophy, he was misled, for Aristotle said not that young men ought not to hear moral, but ought not to study political philosophy. And the error itself is proof positive—it seems to the Baconians—of an identical source for the two passages. It must not be forgotten, however, that the evidence from these coincidences is cited not to an Anti-Shakespearean case—which is purely historical—but as cumulative to the Baconian case alone. And yet, though the evidence from the “parallelisms” is the least forcible of any presented by the Baconians, so systematically do they occur that the ablest Baconian writer (Judge Holmes) claims that he has been able to reduce them to an ordo, and to know precisely where to expect them, by reference merely to a history of the life of Lord Bacon, and the date of the production. “When I got your ‘Letters and Life of Bacon,” he writes to Mr. Spedding, “and read that fragment of a masque; having the dates of all the plays in my mind, I felt quite sure at once in which I should find that same matter, if it appeared anywhere (as I expected it would) and went first straight to the ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream,’ and there came upon it, in the second act, so palpably and unmistakably that I think nothing else than a miracle could shake my belief in it.”1 The facts that Lord Bacon expressed himself to the effect that the best way of teaching history was by means of the drama; that there is a connected and continuous series of historical plays (covering by reigns the entire period of the War of the Roses), in the Shakespearean drama from ‘King John,’ by way of prelude—in which the legitimate heir to the throne is set aside, and the nation plunged into civil war—to ‘Richard III.’ where the two roses are finally united in one line in Henry VI., and winding up with the reign of Henry VIII.—wherein, as a grand finale to the whole, the splendor of the new line is shown in its reunited vigor”—which (with but one hiatus, the missing reign of Henry VII.) is one complete cycle of English history: and that, on searching among the remains of Francis Bacon, a manuscript “History of Henry VII.” is found, which might well be the minutes for a future drama (the opening paragraph of which seems to be a recapitulation of the last scene of the Richard III. of the dramas), is certainly startling. Not necessarily connected with this discovery is the further fact that Mr. Spodding has found, in the library of Northumberland house, among certain of Bacon’s manuscripts, a slip of paper, upon which is scrawled eight times, in a clerky hand (not Bacon’s), the name “William Shakespeare,” together with the names of certain of the known Shakespearian Historical plays, and of certain (as Judge Holmes conjectures) other plays not now
* “Authorship of Shakespeare,” third edition, p. 621.
known. * But there is nothing in this discovery more startling than the numberless other coincidences—if they be nothing more—which Judge Holmes has massed in his scholarly work.
Henry Chettle, in 1603, in his “England’s Mourning Garment (a rhyme),” wonders that “Melicert does not drop a single sable tear” over the death of “Our Elizabeth.” It might, indeed, seem strange had William Shakespeare (supposing these lines to apply to him) been the favorite he is said to have been with Elizabeth. But, while neither Shakespeare nor Bacon sing mortuary strains, of the two (if these stories about Elizabeth’s love for Shakespeare are true) it is certainly not strange that Bacon did not; for Bacon, at least, had no cause to idolize his queen.
Ben Jonson’s eulogies of Shakespeare, in verse, nowhere surpass, as we have seen, his eulogies of Bacon, in prose. He calls Lord Bacon “the acme of our language,” and, as Mr. Thompson suggests, “no pinnacle has two acmes.”
“On every variety of court enfolding,” continues that writer, “was Bacon daily employed, writing in others’ names; and, if we do not think worse of Plato for personating Socrates, or of Cicero for personating Cato,” neither should ill be thought of Bacon for borrowing a name “to cover his aim,” etc.2 Meanwhile, “this acme of our language ’was poor and a borrower.” In 1605, is published an anonymous pamphlet, called “Ratsei’s Ghost.”
* Holmes’ “Authorship of Shakespeare,” 3d edition, pp. 657-
-682.
*** The Renascence Drama, p. 59.
In it, one Ratsei, a highwayman, is about to be hung, and gives some parting advice to a strolling player; tells him to go to London, where he would learn to be frugal and thrifty; to feed upon all men, hut let none feed on him; make his hand stranger to his pocket, his heart slow to perform his tongue’s promise; and when he felt his purse well lined, to buy some place of lordship in the country; that, growing weary of playing, his money may then bring him to dignity and reputation; that he need care for no man—no, not for them that before made him proud with speaking their words on the stage.
“If this satirical passage,” says Mr. Thompson, “plainly alludes to him who went to London very meanly, and came, in time, to be exceedingly wealthy, it confirms Greene’s saying, that Shakespeare made his money by acting, not by writing, plays, and by usury.”*
As to Miss Bacon’s question, “What did William Shakespeare do with Bacon’s manuscripts?” Mr. Thompson ** seems to think that they may yet be brought to light. They “appear to have been so many times hypothetically burned, at Stratford, in the Globe theater, the London fire, by their owners (by purchase) at the play-house, to hinder rivals from using them,” that Mr. Thompson argues that “it is probable they are still to the fore.” Bacon’s Will directs certain papers laid away in boxes, cabinets, and presses, to be collected, sealed up, and put away, “so as not to have them ready for present publication.”
* Renascence Drama, or History made Visible. By “William
Thompson. Melbourne, 1880.
He was “not ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less pains and embracement (perhaps), yield more luster and reputation to my name, than those other which I have in hand.” They could bide their time, and, since William Shakespeare and his fellows do not dispose of them, the inference is that they were not allowed to retain them.
The Baconian theory, it is to be noticed, is quite indifferent as to whether William Shakespeare, on first turning up at London, found employment (as Mr. Grant White asserts) in his “cousin’s law-office” or not: or whether, at any stage in his career, either in Stratford or London, he was an attorney’s clerk, hard ’prentice at the trade of “noverint.” (By which slur Mr. Fullom believes that Nash meant, not that Shakespeare was a “noverint,” but that the young “nove-rints” of the time were “Shakespeare’s;” that is to say, that they scribbled, out of hand, for the stage.) The Shakespearean problem is neither increased nor diminished by the proposition; even an attorney’s clerk could not have written all the Shakespearean pages. Should it be necessary, however, to find a law-student in London who could have managed some of them, why not allow Francis Bacon his claim among the rest? He has, at least, this advantage of his rival; that, while it is the general impression now-a-days that William Shakespeare was not a law-student, as a matter of fact Francis Bacon was.*
But Portia begins her extraordinary (according to common law at least) judgment by deciding for the Jew in that, not having paid the principal sum, Antonio must suffer in the foreclosure of the mortgage, as it were, upon his person. This is against the letter of any known law, which gives an equity of redemption to the debtor in all such cases. Her next decision is, that the Jew has his election between the principal sum and the penalty, and that, with his election, not the law itself can interfere. This, again, is not law; for the law abhors a penalty, and even in a foreclosure will not allow the debtor to be mulcted in more than the face of his debt, interest, and costs. But now, having decided, against all law, for the Jew, Portia begins deciding for the Christian, and the first point she makes is that, when Shylock takes his pound, he must not take a hair’s weight more or less, nor yet one ounce of blood. This, again, is clearly not law, since it is an eternal principle of jurisprudence that, when the law grants any thing it also grants everything that is necessary to the conversion of that thing to possession (as, when it grants a farm, it likewise tacitly grants a right of way to that farm). So, if Shylock had had any title to his pound of flesh, he would certainly have had a title to draw as much blood as it was absolutely necessary to draw in cutting out that pound, and such portions of flesh over and above a pound as it would be absolutely necessary to cut out, providing the cutting out was done by a skillful operator and not a bungler. Astounded at this turn of the tide, Shylock deliberates, and finally cries, “Well, give me my principal and let me go!” Portia thereupon renders her fourth decision, which is the most astounding of all—namely, that, having once refused a tender of the money in open court, the Jew is not entitled to change his mind and take it! Since the days of Moses— certainly since the days of Littleton—a tender has never quite destroyed a debt, but only the interest and costs accruing upon it, after the tender! Such a glaring and high-handed sacrifice of common law and common sense to stage effect might have been conceived of by a manager anxious for the plaudits and pence of a crowded house, scarcely by a future lord chancellor of England.
As to the bibliography of the Baconian theory, there are two volumes which will probably always remain its text-books, viz., Judge Holmes’s book, of which the first edition appeared in 1862; and Mr. Smith’s, printed in 1857, which made a convert of Lord Palmerston. Mr. Wilkes’s exceedingly fresh and readable work, “Shakespeare from an American Point of View,” and Mr. King’s “Bacon versus Shakespeare; a Plea for the Defendant,” as textbooks on the other side, could hardly be expected to produce much disorder in Messrs. Holmes and Smith’s stern and compact columns of facts and argument.
Mr. Wilkes* decides off-hand against this Baconian theory at the start, and then goes on, like his predecessors, to construct a Shakespeare to suit himself. It is to his praise that he has endeavored to construct this Shakespeare out of the Shakespearean pages, rather than to have unreined his fancy. But he makes his own particular Shakespeare, nevertheless. The Wilkes Shakespeare is a Romanist. We consider this to William Shakespeare’s praise, for to be a good Romanist is to be a good Christian, and to be one in a Protestant reign is to be a consistent Christian as well. But this is all the good Mr. Wilkes’s Shakespeare is. Beyond that he is base-born, a man despised of his equals, and a flunkey and tidewaiter at the knees of an aristocracy to which he can not attain—an obscene jester, etc., etc.—and this author he calls Shakespeare. Such a one, whoever he is, is neither Bacon nor Raleigh, at all events. In 1880, Mr. Thompson, of Melbourne, Australia, published a volume, “Renascence Drama; or, History made Visible,”** devoted to an accumulation of fact and argument—rather than to a presentation of the case already made—in favor of the Baconian theory.
Mr. Thompson aims to answer the more refined objections to that theory, by showing that Bacon’s mind and art rather overgrasped than undergrasped the matter and form of these Shakespearean drama, and his work is an extremely valuable and charming contribution to the pro-Baconian view.
In his abounding zeal for “our Shakespeare,” Mr. King* gives us much eulogy, very little argument, and remakes but one or two points, namely, that a large proportion of the Shakespearean characters are made to bear Warwickshire names, such as Ford, Page, Evans, Hugh, Oliver, Sly, Marion Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, Curtis, Burton Heath, Fluellen, Bar-dolph, and so on; and that certain expressions which have puzzled commentators, such as “make straight” (meaning “make haste”), “quoth” (meaning “went”), the use of the word “me” in place of “for me,” “old” for “frequent,” etc., are Warwickshire expressions, and current in no other parts of England. But, as anybody can see, the majority of these are far from being uncommon names, and are quite as prevalent in New York, for example, as they are or were in Warwickshire. And if, as has been suggested, Mr. Manager Shakespeare dressed up his friends’ dialogues for his own stage, and tucked in the clowns and jades, this usage of Warwick names might well be accounted for.
Four of these names are taken out of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and three of them from the induction to the “Taming of the Shrew”—matter in the composition of which Shakespeare or any other playwright might have had the largest hand, without entitling himself to any Olympus. And if, in the dressing up, Shakespeare inserted a clown or a sot here and there, to make sport, what would be more natural than that he should put into their mouths the argot he had grown up amid in his boyhood, and make the drunken turnkey in “Macbeth” to say, with hiccoughs, “If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key?” For, as Mr. King can see for himself, the cardinals and kings do not use these phrases; nor, we may add, are the surnames he particularizes ever bestowed on them, but only on the low-comedy characters of the plays.
Surely, if William Shakespeare ever were forced “upon the country,” as the lawyers say, as against my Lord Bacon, he would wish his case to the jury rather without Mr. King’s “plea” than with it. As a “plea” on any side of an historical question, it is, to be sure, nothing, if not candid; but, as a personal appeal to posterity to, willy-nilly, believe that certain players and others in the age of Elizabeth knew not guile, it is touching and beautiful in the extreme. “Who shall, say Heminges and Condell lied?”* “Could rare Ben Jonson, who is worthy of our love and respect, have lied?”**
Did Shakespeare practice a deceit upon his noble and generous patron? Could he be guilty of a lie?” * And so on. To much the same effect (the reverence due the name “Shakespeare,” the improbability of Jonson and others telling an untruth, etc.) is an anonymous volume, “Shakespeare not an Impostor, by an English Critic,”** published in 1857; and finally, in 1877, was published a paper, read before the Royal Society of Literature, by C. M. Ingleby, M. A., LL.D., a vice-president *** of the same. Dr. Ingleby is severe upon all anti-Shakespeareans, whose minds he likens to “Macadam’s sieves,” which “retain only those ingredients which are unsuited to the end in view” (whatever that may mean), and thinks that “the profession of the law has the inevitable effect of fostering the native tendency of such minds.” Unlike the others, however, Dr. Ingleby does not confine himself to expressions of his interest in the anti-Shakespeareans “as examples of wrong-headedness,” but attempts an examination of the historical testimony. In favor of the Shakespearean authorship, he names seven witnesses, viz., John Harrison, Francis Meres, Robert Greene, Henry Chettle, Heminges, Condell, and Ben Jonson. John Harrison was the printer (publisher) who published the “Venus and Adonis” in 1593, and the “Lucrece” in 1594.
* Ibid., p. 13.
*** “Shakespeare: The Man and the Book.” London: Josiah Adams, Trubner & Co., 1877, Part L, p. 38. “The Authorship of the Works attributed to Shakespeare.”
Each of these was without an author’s name on the title-page, though each was dedicated to Southampton, in an address dedicatory, signed “William Shakespeare.” This is all that the Harrison evidence amounts to, except that Dr. Ingleby says, “It is to me quite incredible that Harrison would have done this unless Shakespeare had written the dedications, or at least had been a party to them.” * As to Meres, anybody can see by reading him that he wrote as a critic, and not as an historian. ** To subpoena Greene as a witness to Shakespeare’s genius, is at least a bold stroke; for, as has been seen, Greene is very emphatic to the effect that William Shakespeare was a mere “Johannes Factotum,” or Jack-of-all-trades, who trained in stolen plumage, and the Shakespeareans (Dr. Ingleby alone excepted) have universally exerted themselves to break the force of this testimony by proving Greene a drunkard, jealous, etc. *** Greene was a graduate of Cambridge—a learned man—“one of the fathers,” says Lamb, “of the English stage.”
* Ibid., p. 42.
** “Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Commonwealth,” 1598.
*** That Robert Greene was much more than a drunkard and a pretender, but that, to the contrary, he had many admirers who were not unaware of the effrontery of his debtor, Shakespeare, a search among the old literature of the day would reveal. In a quarto tract, dated 1594, “Greene’s Funeralls, by R. B., Gent.,” is a copy of verses, the last stanza of which runs:
“Greene is the pleasing object of an eye
Greene pleased the eye of all that looked upon him;
Greene is the ground of every painter’s dye,
Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him:
Nay, more; the men that so eclipsed his fame,
Purloined his plumes, can they deny that same?”
Hallam believes that the last two lines are directed principally at William Shakespeare. (“Literature of Europe,” Part II., ch. vi., p. 32, note.)
A selection of his poems, edited by Lamb, is printed in Bohn’s Standard Library. But by far the most careful account of Greene’s career, as connected with “William Shakespeare, is to be found in “The School of Shakespeare,” by Richard Simpson, London: Chatto & Windus, 1878, Vol. II., p. 339.
He does not seem to have approved of William Shakespeare’s borrowing his plumes; but the impression that he was a monster of debauchery and drunkenness is derived wholly from his own posthumous work, “The Confessions of Robert Greene,” etc., London, 1592, which lays the black paint on so thickly that it should have put the critics on their guard. Greene was probably no worse than his kind. Henry Chettle edited Greene, and personally deprecated some of its hard sayings as to Shakespeare, on account of his (Shakespeare’s) being a clever, civil sort of fellow, and of “his facetious grace in writing;” but more particularly, no doubt, because “divers of worship” had taken him up, and he (Chettle) did not wish to appear as approving slander of a reigning favorite. Heminges and Condell were men of straw, whose names are signed to the preface to the “first folio,” who otherwise bear no testimony one way or the other, but whose book, as will be demonstrated further on, is an unwilling witness against its purported author. And Ben Jonson, who brings up the rear of this precious seven, has been already disposed of. That theory must be pretty soundly grounded in truth, against which there is nothing but rhetoric to hurl, and, in our opinion, it would be entirely safe—if not for the Baconians, for the anti-Shakespeareans, at least—to rest their case on the arguments for the other side. And we believe the more thoughtful among Shakespeareans are beginning to recognize it, and coming to comprehend that, if they are to keep their Shakespeare they must re-write their “Biographies;” spend less time in proving him to have been an epitome of the moral virtues—beyond the temptation of deer stealing, beer drinking, and skylarking, etc.—and devote more attention to his opportunities for acquiring the lore and technical knowledge his alleged pages so accurately handle. Especially has Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his little book (in which he binds himself to cite no dates or authorities subsequent to 1616),* impressed us as endeavoring to meet this emergency. But we find that he has not met it. He has, indeed, developed many details of curious interest—as that John Shakespeare was, in April, 1552, fined twelve pence for throwing muck into the street in front of his house; and that he was several times a candidate for high bailiff of Stratford (or mayor, as the office was afterward called) before finally arriving at that dignity in 1568; that July 15, 1613, there was heard at Worcester Assizes a curious lawsuit, brought by Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, against a neighbor for slandering his wife (Susannah Shakespeare), which suit appears to have been “fixed” in some way before coming to trial.
Mr. Phillips brings much learning to prove that William may have been “pre-contracted” to Anne Hathaway—that his death may have been from malarial fever rather than inebriation—which have nothing at all to do with the question or the practical difficulties cited by the anti-Shakespeareans, one way or the other. But as to those practical difficulties, he brings no light and has no word to say.
Notes
* See this question asked and answered affirmatively in
“North American Review.” February, 1881. New York. D.
Appleton & Co.
* See in this connection “The English of Shakespeare illustrated in a Philological commentary on his ‘Julius Cæsar.’ By G. L. Craik.” London. Chapman & Hall. 1857.
* “Literature of Europe,” Part II, ch. vi, sec. 81. “To be told that he played a trick to a brother player in a licentious amour, or that he died in a drunken frolic.. does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote “Lear.” If there was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of heaven, and it is of him that we desire to know something.” Id. Part II, ch. vi, sec. 35, note.
* Smith, p. 85.
* Shakespeare married a woman older than himself. Why-should he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity?
** “Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements,” Lord Campbell, p.
108. And see “Shakespeare a Lawyer,” by W. L. Rushton.
London, 1858.
* 2 Henry VI., Act 3, scene ii.
** Id., p. cxxi.
* Marabren’s Parallel List of technical Typographical
Terms—art., “Counterfeit.” We take the above from Mr.
Blades’ “Shakespeare and Typography.” London, 1872.
* Bacon was in the habit of sending certain of his lighter manuscripts to Sir Tobie, and this postscript was appended to a letter acknowledging the receipt of Bacon’s “great and esteemed favor of the 9th of April.”
* It is curious to find the Baconians appealing to this
“best evidence” for the other side. But they read it as an
Innuendo. For example, the verses—
“Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage Or influence, cheer the crooping stage!
** It is to be noticed that no similarity of style in these opposed extracts is alleged or relied upon.
* Id., p. 200.
* And too good a law student, we think, to have written the law in the “Merchant of Venice.” For, although Lord Bacon was apt to discover the public feeling, and quick to array himself on the right side (and spitting at Jews has always been accounted of Gentiles for righteousness), he must have seen that Shylock had a standing in court on the merits of his case.
* Shakespeare from an American Point of View. New York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1877.
** Melbourne: Sands & McDougall, Collins street, west,
1880.
* Bacon and Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant. By-
Thomas King. Montreal: Lovell Printing and Publishing
Company, 1875.
* “Bacon versus Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant.”
By-Thomas King. Montreal, and Rouse’s Point, New York:
Lovell Printing, etc., Company, 1875, p. 9.
** Ibid., p. 10. Heminges and Condell “profess that ‘they have done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.’ Yet their utter negligence, shown in their fellow’s volume, is no evidence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of their care or their intelligence. The publication was not, I fear, so much an offering of friendship as a pretext to obtain the copyright.’ (Disraeli, “Amenities of Authors— Shakespeare.”)
** George Townsend (according to Allibone), London: G.
Routledge & Co., Farringdon street, 1857.
* Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. Brighton. Printed for the Author’s friends, 1881. We should add to our list of hooks Mr. O. Follet’s two able pamphlets on the Baconian theory. Sandusky, Ohio, 1880.